Packing worn only items

Certain items (such as armor) don’t have a pack value listed for them. It seems pretty reasonable to pack your leather or chainmail. Would you count these two as pack 2 items and plate as a pack 4? Is worn value x2 a pretty good metric for what an items pack value should be?

Rope is worn/torso 1, pack 2 so that seems reasonable.

No way! Rope is way more compressible than armor.

At a rough guess, i would say that leather and chain take up about 4 to 5 slots and plate takes up about 8.

Chain is radically compressible compare to brigandine, boiled leather, or anything plate-like. A flattened, ‘skrunched’, and then rolled chain hauberk (knee-length) probably is about the volume of bedroll.

The great question is: What is leather armor? I know torchbearer is supposed to be evocative of early dungeon crawlers, but leather armor was not a thing. Neither were frivolous rivets or spikes that seem to adorn a lot of fantasy armor. So how small can a theoretical armor smash down to?

In the same vein, who adventures in full plate? Thor isn’t off base suggesting that it would take more slots than a backpack can hold. Full plate was something people brought with them on a cart along with the people and other material needs of the warrior who would wear it. While you could hire hirelings at later levels, the entire idea of going spelunking as if you were preparing for war seems somewhat mad. Thus I suggest that realism isn’t the metric we are looking for, but game balance. In that light, how many slots is armor worth for carrying?

Don’t forget that under chain goes a quite bulky padded suit.

Yes, but also consider that under chain was worn a bulky padded suit.

That suit is called a gambison and they were also worn alone as armor in addition to being a fashion statement (which the likes of merchants wore, not just warriors of various stripes). Another similar piece of clothing was a doublet, also worn as padding/protection under other armor and as a broader men’s fashion.

I guess my point is that you don’t have to take off the gambison or doublet to pack away your armor.

Sure, for just the chain. But if chain armor can actually ward off arrows and spears, then there’s a pretty thick layer of felt that needs to be worn underneath – and that must be both bulky and heavy to provide any safety.

No one said anything about gambeson being in the mix. Besides, who would utterly disrobe (i.e… down to smallclothes or nude) in any ‘gaming’ situation?

… err, what StevenSv said… :slight_smile: